My Mark Twain (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) , livre ebook

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of Ticknor& Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author. He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819948124
Langue	English

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MY MARK TWAIN
I.
It was in the little office of James T. Fields, overthe bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street,Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, SamuelL. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly,and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand asto manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the book-notices atthe end of the magazine. I wrote nearly all of them myself, and in1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just winning itsway to universal favor. In this review I had intimated myreservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had the luck,if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had nothad before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it doesnot matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy theauthor. He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude intomy memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation,which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here.Throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch wasalways allowing itself a freedom which I cannot bring my fainterpencil to illustrate. He had the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, theElizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not tocall coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was oftenhiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which hehad loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could notbear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quitebear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point bysaying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will notsuffer me the word, then he was Baconian.
At the time of our first meeting, which must havebeen well toward the winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead ofMark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from mypersonal sense) was wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, inthe satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect whichhe was apt to indulge through life. I do not know what drollcomment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment, butprobably he felt that here was an original who was not to bebrought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vividqualities. With his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep ofhis flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly clothed in thatsealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it,sent the cold chills through me when I once accompanied it downBroadway, and shared the immense publicity it won him. He hadalways a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in thewhite suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years, andin the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, andsaid he would like to wear all the time. That was not vanity inhim, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of ourmodern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to everyexcess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pangwhich it gave the sensibilities of others. Then there were times heplayed these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of thewitness. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room atHartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out,and do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, Imust not say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens,and her low, despairing cry of, “Oh, Youth! ” That was her name forhim among their friends, and it fitted him as no other would,though I fancied with her it was a shrinking from his baptismalSamuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier companionships. He wasa youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head ofa sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilfulboy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for just theboy he was.
II.
There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, whichI think is of a year or two, for the next thing I remember of himis meeting him at a lunch in Boston, given us by that genius ofhospitality, the tragically destined Ralph Keeler, author of one ofthe most unjustly forgotten books, 'Vagabond Adventures', a truebit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler never had any money, to thegeneral knowledge, and he never borrowed, and he could not have hadcredit at the restaurant where he invited us to feast at hisexpense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields, much theoldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the trammelsof the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in everyword; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in hisprincely progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothingremains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless andjoyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter,of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmerof wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our jointmockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid thediscourse, so little improving, but so full of good fellowship,Bret Harte's fleeting dramatization of Clemens's mental attitudetoward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why, fellows, ” hespluttered, “this is the dream of Mark's life, ” and I remember theglance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed hisenjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which inrecognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and tocrown the feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter broughtin as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poorKeeler, who took them with appreciative submission. It was in everyway what a Boston literary lunch ought not to have been in thepopular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens.
Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, atSpringfield, where Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford.Aldrich was going on to be his guest, and I was going to be CharlesDudley Warner's, but Clemens had come part way to welcome us both.In the good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two suchdays as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There wasconstant running in and out of friendly houses where the livelyhosts and guests called one another by their Christian names ornicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing atdoors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which hesatisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been anothersealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity whichenabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. The house was thedesign of that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once, whenhard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style ina certain church, proposed that it should be called the Englishviolet order of architecture; and this house was so absolutelysuited to the owner's humor that I suppose there never was anotherhouse like it; but its character must be for recognition fartheralong in these reminiscences. The vividest impression which Clemensgave us two ravenous young Boston authors was of the satisfying,the surfeiting nature of subscription publication. An army ofagents was overrunning the country with the prospectuses of hisbooks, and delivering them by the scores of thousands in completedsale. Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he said, “It sells right along justlike the Bible, ” and 'Roughing It' was swiftly following, withoutperhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lecturedAldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in thetrade which we had thought it the highest success to achieve achance in. “Anything but subscription publication is printing forprivate circulation, ” he maintained, and he so won upon our greedand hope that on the way back to Boston we planned the jointauthorship of a volume adapted to subscription publication. We gota very good name for it, as we believed, in Memorable Murders, andwe never got farther with it, but by the time we reached Boston wewere rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly walk home inthe frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare carfare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that opulence.
III.
The visits to Hartford which had begun with thisaffluence continued without actual increase of riches for me, butnow I went alone, and in Warner's European and Egyptian absences Iformed the habit of going to Clemens. By this time he was in hisnew house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on the groundfloor, and come in at night after I had gone to bed to take off theburglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybodytried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat uplate, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothinghis tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked andtalked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth,and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I wouldcome away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one ofthose locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees atthe end of summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we wentdown to New York together, and sat facing each other in the Pullmansmoker without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say,“Well, we're there. ” Then, with our installation in a now vanishedhotel (the old Brunswick, to be specific), the talk began againwith the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on.We wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he loungedthrough the rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore inpreference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the story ofhis life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story,which I could never tire of even when it began to be told overagain. Or at times he would reason high—
"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, "
walking up and down, and ha